Merging the three provinces of Mosul, Baghdad, and Al-Baṣrah into one political entity and creating a nation out of the diverse religious and ethnic elements inhabiting these lands were accomplished after World War I. Action undertaken by the British military authorities during the war and the upsurge of nationalism afterward helped determine the shape of the new Iraqi state and the course of events during the postwar years until Iraq finally emerged as an independent political entity in 1932.

British control of Iraq, however, was short-lived. After the war Britain debated both its general policy in Iraq and the specific type of administration to establish. Two schools of thought influenced policy makers in London. The first, advocated by the Colonial Office, stressed a policy of direct control to protect British interests in the Persian Gulf and India. Assessing British policy from India, this school may be called the Indian school of thought. The other school, hoping to conciliate Arab nationalists, advised indirect control. In Iraq itself British authorities were divided on the issue. Some, under the influence of Sir Arnold Wilson, the acting civil commissioner, advocated direct control; others, alarmed by growing dissatisfaction with the British administration, advised indirect control and suggested the establishment of an indigenous regime under British supervision. Britain was still undecided on which policy it should follow in 1920 when events in other Arab countries radically changed conditions in Iraq.

Early in 1920 the emir Fayṣal I, son of the sharif Ḥusayn ibn ʿAlī (then king of the Hejaz), who had led the Arab Revolt of 1916 against the Ottomans, established an Arab government in Damascus and was proclaimed king of Syria. Meanwhile, a group of Iraqi nationalists met in Damascus to proclaim the emir ʿAbd Allāh, older brother of Fayṣal, king of Iraq. Under the influence of nationalist activities in Syria, nationalist agitation followed first in northern Iraq and then in the tribal areas of the middle Euphrates. By the summer of 1920, the revolt had spread to all parts of the country except the big cities of Mosul, Baghdad, and Al-Baṣrah, where British forces were stationed.

In July 1920 Fayṣal came into conflict with the French authorities over control of Syria. France had been given the mandate over Syria and Lebanon in April and was determined to obtain Fayṣal’s acceptance of the mandate. Nationalists urged Fayṣal to reject the French demands, and the conflict that ensued between him and the French resulted in his expulsion from Syria. Fayṣal went to London to complain about the French action.

Although the revolt in Iraq was suppressed by force, it prompted Iraq and Great Britain to reconcile their differences. In Britain a segment of public opinion wanted to “get out of Mesopotamia” and urged relief from further commitments. In Iraq the nationalists were demanding independence. In 1921 Britain offered the Iraqi throne to Fayṣal along with the establishment of an Arab government under British mandate. Fayṣal wanted the throne if it was offered to him by the Iraqi people. He also suggested the replacement of the mandate by a treaty of alliance. These proposals were accepted by the British government, and Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill promised to carry them out. He was advised by T.E. Lawrence, known for his sympathy for the Arabs.

In March 1921 a conference presided over by Churchill was held in Cairo to settle Middle Eastern affairs. Fayṣal was nominated to the Iraqi throne with the provision that a plebiscite be held to confirm the nomination. Sir Percy Cox, recently appointed a high commissioner for Iraq, was responsible for carrying out the plebiscite. A provisional government set up by Cox shortly before the Cairo Conference passed a resolution in July 1921 declaring Fayṣal king of Iraq, provided that his “Government shall be constitutional, representative and democratic.” The plebiscite confirmed this proclamation, and Fayṣal was formally crowned king on August 23.

The establishment of the monarchy was the first step in setting up a national regime. Two other steps followed immediately: the signing of a treaty of alliance with Great Britain and the drafting of a constitution. It was deemed necessary that a treaty precede the constitution and define relations between Iraq and Britain. The treaty was signed on October 10, 1922. Without direct reference it reproduced most of the provisions of the mandate. Iraq undertook to respect religious freedom and missionary enterprises and the rights of foreigners, to treat all states equally, and to cooperate with the League of Nations. Britain was obligated to offer advice on foreign and domestic affairs, such as military, judicial, and financial matters (defined in separate and subsidiary agreements). Although the terms of the treaty were open to periodic revision, they were to last 20 years. In the meantime, Britain agreed to prepare Iraq for membership in the League of Nations “as soon as possible.”

It soon became apparent that the substance, though not the form, of the mandate was still in existence and that complete independence had not been achieved. Strong opposition to the treaty in the press made it almost certain that it would not be ratified by Iraq’s Constituent Assembly. Nor was British public opinion satisfied with the commitments to Iraq. During the general elections of 1922, there was a newspaper campaign against British expenditures in Iraq. In deference to public opinion in both Britain and Iraq, a protocol to the treaty was signed in April 1923, reducing the period of the treaty from 20 to 4 years. Despite the shortening of British tutelage, the Constituent Assembly demanded complete independence when the treaty was put before it for approval. Ratification of the treaty was accomplished in June 1924, after Britain’s warning that nonapproval would lead to the referral of the matter to the League of Nations.

The Constituent Assembly then considered a draft constitution drawn up by a constitutional committee. The committee tried to give extensive powers to the king. Discussion on the draft constitution by the Constituent Assembly lasted a month, and after minor modifications it was adopted in July 1924. The Organic Law, as the constitution was called, went into effect right after it was signed by the king in March 1925. It provided for a constitutional monarchy, a parliamentary government, and a bicameral legislature. The latter was composed of an elected House of Representatives and an appointed Senate. The lower house was to be elected every four years in a free manhood suffrage. The first Parliament met in 1925. Ten general elections were held before the downfall of the monarchy in 1958. The more than 50 cabinets formed during the same period reflected the instability of the system.

From the establishment of a national government, there was keen interest in organizing political parties. Three parties formed in 1921, one by the group in power and two by opposition parties, had similar social and economic views and essentially the same political objective: terminating the mandate and winning independence. They differed, however, on the means of realizing the objective. After the achievement of independence in 1932, these parties dissolved, because their raison d’être had disappeared. It was only when social issues were discussed that new political groupings, even if not formally organized as political parties, began to emerge. The power struggle between these groups became exceedingly intense after World War II (1939–45).

The Iraqi nationalists, though appreciating the free expression of opinion permitted under a parliamentary system, were far from satisfied with the mandate. They demanded independence as a matter of right, as promised in war declarations and treaties, rather than as a matter of capacity for self-government as laid down in the mandate. Various attempts were made to redefine Anglo-Iraqi relations, as embodied in the 1926 and 1927 treaties, without fundamentally altering Britain’s responsibility. The British treaties were viewed by the nationalists not only as an impediment to the realization of Iraq’s nationalist aspirations but also as inimical to the economic development of the country. The nationalists viewed the situation as a “perplexing predicament” (al-waḍʿ al-shādh)—a term that became popular in Parliament and in the press. It referred to the impossibility of government by the dual authority of the mandate. The nationalists argued that there were two governments in Iraq, one foreign and the other national, and that such a regime was an abnormality that, though feasible in theory, was unworkable in practice.

In 1929 Britain decided to end this stalemate and reconcile its interests with Iraq’s national aspirations. It notified Iraq that the mandate would be terminated in 1932, and a new treaty of independence was negotiated. A new government was formed, headed by General Nūrī al-Saʿīd, who helped in achieving Iraq’s independence.

The new treaty was signed in June 1930. It provided for the establishment of a “close alliance” between Britain and Iraq with “full and frank consultation between them in all matters of foreign policy which may affect their common interests.” Iraq would maintain internal order and defend itself against foreign aggression, supported by Britain. Any dispute between Iraq and a third state involving the risk of war was to be discussed with Britain in the hope of a settlement in accordance with the Covenant of the League of Nations. In the event of an imminent threat of war, the two parties would take a common defense position. Iraq recognized that the maintenance and protection of essential British communications was in the interest of both parties. Air-base sites for British troops were therefore granted near Al-Baṣrah and west of the Euphrates, but these forces “shall not constitute in any manner an occupation, and will in no way prejudice the sovereign rights of Iraq.” This treaty, valid for 25 years, was to go into effect after Iraq joined the League of Nations.

In 1932, when Iraq was still under British control, the boundaries between Iraq and Kuwait were clearly defined in an exchange of letters between the two governments, but they were never ratified by Iraq in accordance with the Iraqi constitution. This set the stage for future Iraqi claims on Kuwaiti territory, particularly on the islands of Būbiyān and Warbah, which had originally been part of the Ottoman province of Al-Baṣrah but had been ceded to Kuwait in the unratified convention of 1913.

Independence, 1932–39

On October 3, 1932, Iraq was admitted to the League of Nations as an independent state. Since conflict between Iraq’s political leaders centred essentially on how to end the mandate rather than on the right of independence, King Fayṣal sought the cooperation of opposition leaders after independence. Shortly after Iraq’s admission to the League, Nūrī al-Saʿīd, who had been prime minister since 1930, resigned. After an interim administration, King Fayṣal invited Rashīd ʿAlī al-Gaylānī, one of the opposition leaders, to form a new government. For a short while it seemed that all the country’s leaders would close ranks and devote all their efforts to internal reforms.

But internal dissension soon developed. The first incident was the Assyrian uprising of 1933. The Assyrians, a small Christian community living in Mosul province, were given assurances of security by both Britain and Iraq. When the mandate was ended, the Assyrians began to feel insecure and demanded new assurances. Matters came to a head in the summer of 1933 when King Fayṣal was in Europe. The opposition, now in power, wanted to impress the public through a high-handed policy toward a minority group. In clashes with the Iraqi troops, several hundred Assyrians were brutally killed. The incident was brought to the attention of the League of Nations less than a year after Iraq had given assurances that it would protect minority rights. Had King Fayṣal been in the country, he likely would have counseled moderation. Upon his hasty return to Baghdad, he found deep-seated divisions and a situation beyond his control. Suffering from heart trouble, he returned to Switzerland, where he died in September 1933. The Assyrian incident brought about the fall of Rashīd ʿAlī and his replacement by a moderate government.

Fayṣal was succeeded by his son, King Ghāzī (1933–39), who was young and inexperienced—a situation that gave political leaders an opportunity to compete for power. Without political parties to channel their activities through constitutional processes, politicians resorted to extraconstitutional, or violent, methods. One method was to embarrass those in power by press attacks, palace intrigues, or incidents that would cause cabinet dissension and force the prime minister to resign. The first five governmental changes after independence, from 1932 to 1934, were produced by these methods.

Another tactic was to incite tribal uprisings in areas where there were tribal chiefs unfriendly to the group in power. Tribes, though habitually opposed to authority, had been brought under control and remained relatively quiet after 1932. When opposition leaders began to incite them against the government in 1934, however, they rebelled and caused the fall of three governments from 1934 to 1935.

A third method was military intervention. The opposition would try to obtain the loyalty of army officers, plan a coup d’état, and force those in power to resign. This method, often resorted to by the opposition, proved to be the most dangerous because, once the army intervened in politics, it became increasingly difficult to reestablish civilian rule. From 1936 until 1941, when it was defeated in a war with Britain, the army dominated domestic politics. (The army again intervened in 1958 and remained the dominant force in politics until the rise of the Baʿth Party 10 years later.)

Two different sets of opposition leaders produced the first military coup, in 1936. The first group, led by Ḥikmat Sulaymān, was a faction of old politicians who sought power by violent methods. The other was the Ahālī group, composed mainly of young men who advocated socialism and democracy and sought to carry out reform programs. It was Ḥikmat Sulaymān, however, who urged General Bakr Ṣidqī, commander of an army division, to stage a surprise attack on Baghdad in cooperation with another military commander and forced the cabinet to resign. Apparently, King Ghāzī was also disenchanted with the group in power and so allowed the government to resign. Ḥikmat Sulaymān became prime minister in October 1936, and Bakr Ṣidqī was appointed chief of general staff. Neither the Ahālī group nor Ḥikmat Sulaymān could improve social conditions, however, because the army gradually dominated the political scene. Supported by opposition leaders, a dissident military faction assassinated Bakr Ṣidqī, but civilian rule was not reestablished. This first military coup introduced a new factor in politics. Lack of leadership after the assassination of Bakr Ṣidqī left the army divided, while jealousy among leading army officers induced each faction to support a different set of civilian leaders. The army became virtually the deciding factor in cabinet changes and remained so until 1941.

Despite political instability, material progress continued during King Ghāzī’s short reign. Oil had been discovered near Karkūk in 1927, and, by the outbreak of World War II, oil revenue had begun to play an important role in domestic spending and added a new facet to Iraq’s foreign relations. The Al-Kūt irrigation project, begun in 1934, was completed, and other projects, to be financed by oil royalties, were planned. The pipelines from the Karkūk oil fields to the Mediterranean were opened in 1935. The railroads, still under British control, were purchased in 1935, and the Baʿījī-Tal Küçük section, the only missing railway link between the Persian Gulf and Europe, was completed in 1938. There was also a noticeable increase in construction, foreign trade, and educational facilities. Several disputes with neighbouring countries were settled, including one over the boundary with Syria, which was concluded in Iraq’s favour; Iraq thereafter possessed the Sinjār Mountains. A nonaggression pact, called the Saʿdābād Pact, between Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, and Iraq was signed in 1937. In 1939, shortly before the outbreak of World War II, King Ghāzī was killed in a car accident, and his son Fayṣal II ascended the throne. As Fayṣal was only four years old, his uncle, Emir ʿAbd al-Ilāh, was appointed regent and served in this capacity for the next 14 years.

World War II and British intervention, 1939–45

Nūrī al-Saʿīd, author of the 1930 treaty, was prime minister when war broke out. Believing that the Anglo-Iraqi alliance was the best guarantee for Iraqi security, he wanted to declare war on Germany, but his ministers counseled caution, as British victory was then in doubt. The premier accordingly declared Iraq nonbelligerent and severed diplomatic relations with Germany. When Italy entered the war in 1940, however, Nūrī al-Saʿīd, then minister of foreign affairs in the cabinet of newly appointed prime minister Rashīd ʿAlī al-Gaylānī, was unable to persuade the cabinet to break off diplomatic relations with Italy. Under the influence of pan-Arab leaders, public opinion in Iraq changed radically after France’s fall, becoming especially hostile to Britain because other Arab countries remained under foreign control. Pan-Arabs urged Iraqi leaders to free Syria and Palestine and achieve unity among Arab countries. Extremists advocated alliance with Germany as the country that would foster independence and unity among Arabs.

Rashīd ʿAlī was at first unwilling to side with the extremists and gave lip service to the Anglo-Iraqi alliance. Dissension among the Iraqi leaders, however, forced him to side with the pan-Arabs. Leading army officers also fell under pan-Arab influences and encouraged Rashīd ʿAlī to detach Iraq from the British alliance. During 1940 and 1941, Iraqi officers were unwilling to cooperate with Britain, and the pan-Arab leaders began secret negotiations with the Axis Powers. Britain decided to send reinforcements to Iraq. Rashīd ʿAlī, while allowing a small British force to land in 1940, was forced to resign early in 1941, but he was reinstated by the army in April and refused further British requests for reinforcements.

British contingents entered Iraq from the Persian Gulf and from the Ḥabbāniyyah air base in April and May 1941; armed conflict with Iraqi forces followed. The hostilities lasted only 30 days, during which period a few Iraqi leaders, including the regent and Nūrī al-Saʿīd, fled the country. By the end of May, the Iraqi army had capitulated. Rashīd ʿAlī and his pan-Arab supporters left the country.

The return of the regent and moderate leaders through British intervention had far-reaching consequences. Britain was given what it demanded: the use of transportation and communication facilities and a declaration of war on the Axis Powers in January 1942. Rashīd ʿAlī’s supporters were dismissed from the service, and some were interned for the duration of the war. Four officers who were responsible for the British-Iraqi conflict were hanged.

Postwar reconstruction and social upheavals, 1945–58

During World War II, liberal and moderate Iraqi elements began to play an active political role. The entry of the United States and the Soviet Union into the war and their declarations in favour of democratic freedoms greatly enhanced the position of the Iraqi democratic elements. The people endured shortages and regulations restricting personal liberty and the freedom of the press, trusting that the end of the war would bring the promised better way of life. The government, however, paid no attention to the new spirit, and the wartime regulations and restrictions continued after the war. The regent, ʿAbd al-Ilāh, called a meeting of the country’s leaders in 1945 and made a speech in which he attributed public disaffection to the absence of a truly parliamentary system. He called for the formation of political parties and promised full freedom for their activities and the launching of social and economic reforms.

The immediate reactions to the regent’s speech were favourable, but, when political parties were formed in 1946 and certain regulations were abolished, the older politicians and vested interests resisted. The new government formed in January 1946 was overthrown within a few months of its inception. Nūrī al-Saʿīd then became prime minister and tried to enlist the cooperation of political parties, but the general elections held under his government’s supervision were no different from previous controlled elections. The parties boycotted the elections. Nūrī al-Saʿīd resigned in March 1947, and Ṣāliḥ Jabr formed a new government.

Jabr, the first Shīʿite politician to become a prime minister, included in his cabinet a number of young men, but he himself was unacceptable to some liberal and nationalist elements who had been roughly handled when he was wartime minister of interior. Jabr tried to help the Arabs in Palestine in order to improve his image in nationalist circles, but he mishandled opposition leaders. Most damaging was his attempt to replace the Anglo-Iraqi treaty of 1930 without consulting with Iraqi leaders. When he was asked to consult with others, he called in only older politicians and excluded the younger leaders.

Jabr entered into negotiations with Britain with the intention of enhancing his own position. When he found that Britain wanted to retain control of its air bases in Iraq, he insisted that Britain accept the principle of Iraqi control of the bases; Iraq would allow Britain to use them in the event of war. He threatened to resign if Britain refused his proposals.

It was with this understanding that Jabr proceeded to London early in 1948 to negotiate a new treaty. He and Ernest Bevin, the British foreign secretary, quickly came to an agreement and signed a 20-year treaty at Portsmouth on January 15, 1948. It provided for a new alliance between Iraq and Britain on the basis of equality and complete independence and required that “each of the high contracting parties undertake not to adopt in foreign countries an attitude which is inconsistent with the alliance or which might create difficulties for the other party.” An improvement of the 1930 treaty, this document sought an alliance on the basis of mutual interests. The two air bases, which were often the subject of criticism, were returned to Iraq. British forces were to be evacuated, and Iraq would be supplied with arms and military training. The annex to the treaty stressed the importance of the air bases as “an essential element in the defense of Iraq.” Britain’s use of the bases in the event of war, or threat of war, would depend on Iraq’s invitation. The treaty also provided for the establishment of a joint defense board for common defense and consultation. Both parties agreed to grant each other necessary facilities for defense purposes.

Despite these advances, the treaty was repudiated immediately in a popular uprising. Street demonstrations had occurred before the treaty was signed, in defense of Arab rights in Palestine, but, when the news of the signing of the new treaty was broadcast in London, rioting and demonstrations in Baghdad followed. Within a week of the signing, the regent called a meeting at the royal household that was attended by both older and younger leaders. After deliberations, they decided to repudiate the treaty. Jabr returned to Baghdad to defend his position but to no avail. Rioting and demonstrations increased, and Jabr was forced to resign.

The new treaty was not the root cause of the uprising. It was the culmination of a struggle between the young, liberal leaders who wanted to participate in political activities and the older leaders who insisted on excluding them. This conflict continued after the treaty was rejected. The older politicians returned to power under Nūrī al-Saʿīd’s leadership.

In 1952 another popular uprising flared, stirred by opposition leaders and carried out by students and extremists. The police were unable to control the mob, and the regent called on the army to maintain public order. The chief of the general staff governed the country under martial law for more than two months. Civilian rule was restored at the beginning of 1953, but there was no sign that the country’s older leaders were prepared to share authority with their opponents.

Meanwhile, King Fayṣal II, who had come of age, began to exercise his formal powers, and the period of regency came to an end. It was hoped that ʿAbd al-Ilāh would withdraw from active politics and allow the political forces of the country to create a new order. The former regent, who became the crown prince, continued to control political events from behind the scenes, however, and the struggle for power among the leaders continued with increasing intensity until the downfall of the monarchy in 1958.

Despite political instability, Iraq achieved material progress during the 1950s, thanks to a new oil agreement that increased royalties and to the establishment of the Development Board. The original oil agreement between the Iraqi government and the IPC had heretofore yielded relatively modest royalties, owing to certain technical limitations (such as the need for pipelines) and to war conditions. It was not until 1952 that construction of pipelines to Bāniyās was completed.

Some points of dispute between the government and the IPC were not entirely resolved. The nationalization of the oil industry in Iran and the announcement of the 1950 agreement between Saudi Arabia and Aramco (Arabian American Oil Company, later Saudi Aramco), on a half-and-half basis of payment, induced the Iraqi government and the IPC to negotiate a new agreement on the division of profits. Some opposition leaders demanded that the oil industry be nationalized, but the Iraqi government and the IPC, forestalling any serious move for nationalization, agreed to negotiate on the basis of the fifty-fifty formula, to the mutual advantage of Iraq and the company. The new agreement was signed in 1952; it allowed Iraq to take part of its share of the profits in kind and to receive an increasing amount of royalties specifically agreed upon between the two parties. It was stated that Iraq would receive a set minimum amount of the proceeds in 1953 and all subsequent years.

In 1950 the government had created an independent Development Board, an agency immune from political pressures and responsible directly to the prime minister. The board had six executive members, three of whom had to be experts in some branch of the development program. The prime minister, as chairman, and the minister of finance were ex officio members. An amendment to the law increased membership by two and provided for a minister of development responsible directly to the head of the cabinet. These members were appointed by the cabinet, had equal voting rights, and were not permitted to hold any other official position. Two foreign members held positions as experts, and the Iraqi members were selected on merit and past experience. The board was composed of a council and ministry. Its staff was divided into technical sections and the ministry into a number of departments. The technical sections were for irrigation, flood control, water storage, drainage, transportation, and industrial and agricultural development. The board was financed from 70 percent of oil royalties and from loans and revenues from the board’s own projects.

In 1950 the World Bank provided a loan for the Wadi Al-Tharthār flood-control project, and other flood-control plans were constructed. Extensive work on bridges and public buildings—including schools, hospitals, a new Parliament building, and a royal house—was started. This work, especially the work on dams and irrigation projects, was a long-term investment, and many short-term projects of more direct benefit to the population were neglected. Opposition leaders attacked the Development Board for the stress on long-term projects that they claimed benefited only the vested interests—landowners and tribal chiefs. Despite criticism, the board maintained an independent status rarely enjoyed by any other government department. Nevertheless, the public remained unaware of the far-reaching effects of the projects undertaken, while the opposition attacked the board for squandering funds on contracts given to wealthy landlords and influential politicians.

The Republic of Iraq

The 1958 revolution and its aftermath

Despite the country’s material progress, the monarchy failed to win public support and, in particular, the confidence of the younger generation. Before the revolution, Iraq lacked an enlightened leadership capable of achieving progress and inspiring public confidence. The new generation offered such leadership, but the older leaders resisted and embarked on an unpopular foreign policy, including an alliance with Britain through participation in the Baghdad Pact and opposition to the establishment of the United Arab Republic (U.A.R.) by Egypt and Syria.

The failure of younger civilians to obtain power aroused the concern of some young military officers who, required by military discipline to take no part in politics, called themselves the Free Officers and began to organize in small groups and to lay down revolutionary plans. The number of Free Officers was relatively small, but there was a considerably larger group of sympathizers. The officers worked in cells, and the identities of the participants were kept secret. Only the Central Organization, which supplied the movement’s leadership, was known to all the Free Officers. The Central Organization was composed of 14 officers, headed by ʿAbd al-Karīm Qāsim, the group’s highest-ranking member.

Of the several plots proposed, that laid down by Qāsim and his close collaborator ʿAbd al-Salām ʿĀrif proved the most appropriate. The general staff issued an order to the brigade in which ʿĀrif served to proceed to Jordan in July 1958 to reinforce Jordanian forces against alleged threats by Israel. Brigadier Qāsim, in command of another brigade, was to protect the troops going to Jordan. He and ʿĀrif agreed that, as the brigade proceeding to Jordan passed through Baghdad, it would capture the city.

On July 14 the revolutionary forces captured the capital, declared the downfall of the monarchy, and proclaimed a republic. The leading members of the royal house, including the king and the crown prince, were executed, and Nūrī al-Saʿīd was killed. Qāsim, head of the revolutionary force, formed a cabinet, over which he presided, and appointed himself commander of the national forces. He also assumed the portfolio of defense minister and appointed ʿĀrif minister of the interior and deputy commander of the national forces. A Council of Sovereignty, composed of three persons, was to act as head of state.

A provisional constitution declared that Iraq formed an integral part “of the Arab nation” and that “Arabs and Kurds are considered partners in this homeland.” Iraq was declared a republic and Islam the religion of the state; all executive and legislative powers were entrusted to the Sovereignty Council and the cabinet. It soon became clear, however, that power rested in Qāsim’s hands, supported by the army.

Conflicts among the officers developed, first between Qāsim and ʿĀrif and then between Qāsim and his supporters. ʿĀrif championed the pan-Arab cause and advocated Iraq’s union with the U.A.R. Qāsim rallied the forces against Arab unity—Kurds, communists, and others—and stressed Iraq’s own identity and internal unity. ʿĀrif was dropped from power in October, but in 1959 Qāsim’s power was threatened by other factions. He tried to divert public attention to foreign affairs by advancing Iraq’s claim to Kuwait’s sovereignty in June 1961. This brought him into conflict not only with Britain and Kuwait but also with the other Arab countries. He opened negotiations with the Iraq Petroleum Company to increase Iraq’s share of the royalties, but his extreme demands caused negotiations to break down in 1961. Public Law 80 was enacted to prohibit the granting of concessions to any foreign company and to transfer control over all matters connected with oil to the Iraq National Oil Company (INOC).

By 1963 Qāsim had become isolated internally as well as externally; he had survived several assassination attempts (a participant in one such attack was young Ṣaddām Ḥussein), and the only great power with which he remained friendly was the Soviet Union. When one faction of the army, in cooperation with one Arab nationalist group—the Iraqi regional branch of the Arab Socialist Baʿth (“Revivalist” or “Renaissance”) Party—started a rebellion in February 1963, the regime suddenly collapsed, and Qāsim was executed.

Recurrence of military coups, 1963–68

The military faction that brought about the collapse of the Qāsim regime preferred to remain behind the scenes rather than assume direct responsibility. The Baʿth Party, a group of young activists who advocated Arab nationalism and socialism, was entrusted with power. Baʿth leaders invited ʿAbd al-Salām ʿĀrif to assume the presidency. A National Council for Revolutionary Command (NCRC), composed of civilian and military leaders, was established to assume legislative and executive powers. The premiership was entrusted to Colonel Aḥmad Ḥasan al-Bakr, a Baʿthist officer.

Some of the Baʿth leaders wanted to carry out Baʿth socialist ideas; others advised more caution. A compromise was finally reached in which the party’s goals—Arab unity, freedom, and socialism—were reaffirmed in principle, but it was decided to adopt a transitional program. Industrialization and economic development were stressed, and the role of the middle class was recognized. The dissension among Baʿth leaders, however, soon led to the collapse of the regime. President ʿĀrif, whose powers initially had been restricted by the Baʿth leaders, rallied the military forces to his side. In November 1963 he placed the leaders of the Baʿth Party under arrest and took control, becoming, in both fact and name, the real ruler of the country. In May 1964 a new provisional constitution was promulgated in which the principles of Arab unity and socialism were adopted, and in July the banks and a number of the country’s industries were nationalized.

The idea of Arab socialism attracted only a small group in Iraq, and ʿĀrif began to discover its unfavourable effects on the country. ʿĀrif himself had never been a believer in socialism, but he had adopted it under the influence of Egypt. The adverse influence of nationalization gave him an excuse to replace the group that supported socialism with others who would pay attention to the reality of Iraq’s economic conditions. Nor had ʿĀrif been happy with the group of officers who had elevated him to power. He began to prepare the way to entrusting power to civilian hands willing to be guided by him as chief executive.

In September 1965 ʿĀrif invited ʿAbd al-Raḥman al-Bazzāz, a distinguished lawyer, diplomat, and writer on Arab nationalism, to form a new government. Al-Bazzāz did not feel that he should abolish Arab socialism, but he offered to increase production and create a balance between the public and private sectors.

ʿĀrif died suddenly in a helicopter crash in April 1966. Even before his death, Premier al-Bazzāz, known for his opposition to military interference in politics, had begun to talk about the need to hold elections for a representative assembly. Military officers pressured the new president, ʿAbd al-Raḥman ʿĀrif, elder brother of the late president, to remove al-Bazzāz, and the cabinet resigned in August 1966. Power remained in military hands, but factionalism in the army was accentuated and leadership frequently changed. The Arab defeat in the Arab-Israeli War of 1967, in which Iraq took only a nominal role, led to intense unrest within the country and within the party. The Baʿth, joined by other opposition leaders, called for the formation of a coalition government and general elections for a National Assembly. President ʿĀrif paid no attention to their demands.

Iraqi foreign policy, 1958–68

Following the 1958 revolution, President Qāsim steered his country’s foreign policy gradually away from the sphere of Western influence—and close ties with the United Kingdom—toward closer relations with the Soviet Union. In 1959 Iraq officially left the pro-Western Baghdad Pact, but, though the Qāsim government came to depend on Soviet weapons and received some economic aid, it retained lively commercial ties with the West. Further, because Qāsim recruited among the Iraqi Communist Party for support and because he moved far closer to the Soviet Union diplomatically, the United States grew to see in him a would-be communist. However, despite a growing dispute with the Western oil companies over their investments in Iraq (stemming from Qāsim’s demand of a greater share of the proceeds) and steps by the government that limited oil company activities in Iraq, Qāsim carefully refrained from nationalizing Iraq’s oil industry. Also, fearing Egyptian domination, as had happened in the Syrian province of the U.A.R., Qāsim rejected the courtship of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser and refused a merger with Egypt. This led the two Free Officers’ regimes—as the Egyptian regime was also termed—into a conflict that greatly embarrassed the Soviet Union and occasionally forced it to take sides.

This also strongly influenced Qāsim’s approach to Israel. While he paid lip service to anti-Zionist sentiments in Iraq, there was no way that he and Nasser could collaborate against Israel, and tension with the Hāshimite monarchy of Jordan made it impossible for him to send an expeditionary force to Jordan, even had he wanted to do so. On the Israeli side this fact was fully appreciated at the time. Relations with pro-Western Iran were tense also, but the two countries avoided a direct military confrontation.

Qāsim’s relations with most of the Arab world worsened after Iraq left the Arab League in 1961 in protest against the organization’s support for Kuwait’s independence. Iraq had continued to press its claims to Kuwaiti territory in the 1940s and ’50s (largely over the islands of Būbiyān and Warbah), but not until the Qāsim regime did it forward a serious claim of overall sovereignty. In 1963, after Qāsim’s demise, Kuwait came to an agreement with Aḥmad Ḥasan al-Bakr—who was then Iraq’s prime minister—confirming Kuwait’s independence and resolving all border issues; however, once again the agreement failed to be ratified, this time by Iraq’s president, ʿAbd al-Salām ʿĀrif.

The Baʿth-ʿĀrif regime (February–November 1963) had little time for foreign policy formulation, as the various party factions were far too busy fighting one another. Having killed thousands of communists and their supporters, however, the Baʿth regime completely alienated the Soviet Union, and Soviet weapons shipments stopped. The regime also alienated Egypt by rejecting the U.A.R. merger. Of all the Arab countries, only relations with Syria, again independent and now also under Baʿth rule, remained cordial.

During the regimes of the ʿĀrif brothers (1963–68), Iraq remained essentially within the Soviet sphere of influence, but in early 1967 there were signs of a limited rapprochement with the West. Iraq’s Arab relations improved greatly, albeit at the expense of Iraqi independence. ʿAbd al-Salām ʿĀrif reversed the country’s policy toward Nasser’s government in Egypt, in effect turning Iraq into an Egyptian satellite. Although it was Nasser who now rejected Iraq’s request for unification, relations between the two countries became extremely close. ʿAbd al-Salām’s policy toward Israel mimicked that of Egypt, and, when tensions along the Israeli-Egyptian border grew to the dangerous proportions that led to the Six-Day War of June 1967, the Iraqi leader dispatched an armoured brigade to Jordan. Events moved too fast, however, and most of the brigade was destroyed by the Israeli air force before it could reach the front line.

The revolution of 1968

The second Baʿth government

After ʿAbd al-Salām ʿĀrif took control in 1963, the Baʿth Party was forced underground and began to make sweeping changes in its leadership and strategy in order to recapture power. Al-Bakr became secretary of the Regional Leadership (RL) of the Baʿth Party in 1964. He was assisted in reorganizing the party by Ṣaddām Ḥussein, who proved to be instrumental in rallying civilian Baʿthist support for al-Bakr. A premature attempt to seize power in September 1964 led to the imprisonment of the principal Baʿth leaders, including al-Bakr and Ṣaddām. In 1965 al-Bakr was released because of illness, and in 1966 Ṣaddām escaped.

The revolution of 1968

In July 1968 the government was overthrown by the army, with some assistance from civilian party activists. The reasons given were the corruption of the ʿĀrif regime, Kurdish disturbances in the north, the government’s failure to adequately support other Arab countries in the Six-Day War of 1967, and ʿĀrif’s subservience to Nasser’s Egypt. Except for the charge of corruption (ʿĀrif had no bank accounts abroad and had little property inside Iraq), the charges were valid but were only circumstantial. The root causes went much deeper. The ʿĀrif regime, because it had not held popular elections, had failed to attain legitimacy. Barring that, it failed even to attempt to build a party structure or mobilize mass support. Instead, it depended completely on military support, which since 1936 had been inconsistent and capricious. Finally, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ʿĀrif was anything but an inspiring leader. When the Baʿth Party persuaded a few officers in key positions to abandon the regime, the fate of the ʿĀrif government was sealed.

Four officers agreed to cooperate with the Baʿth Party. These were Colonel ʿAbd al-Razzāq al-Nāyif, head of military intelligence, Colonel Ibrāhīm ʿAbd al-Raḥman al-Dāʾūd, chief of the Republican Guard, Colonel Saʿdūn Ghaydān, and Colonel Hammād Shihāb. The first two agreed to cooperate on condition that al-Nāyif be the new premier and al-Dāʾūd the minister of defense. Shihāb agreed to help on the condition that ʿĀrif not be harmed. The Baʿth Party accepted this arrangement as a means to achieve power but intended to bridle the officers at the earliest-possible moment, having little confidence in their loyalty.

On the morning of July 17, President ʿĀrif’s palace was stormed by Baʿthist officers led by al-Bakr. ʿĀrif immediately surrendered and agreed to leave the country. He went to London and then to Istanbul, where he lived in modest obscurity, before returning to Iraq some 20 years later.

The first act of the new regime was to establish the Revolutionary Command Council (RCC), which assumed supreme authority. The RCC elected al-Bakr president of the republic, and he invited al-Nāyif to form a cabinet. Al-Bakr was not interested in administrative details, and, as he grew older and his health deteriorated, he began to depend more heavily on Ṣaddām to carry out the business of government.

Almost immediately a struggle for power arose between the Baʿth and the Nāyif-Dāʾūd group, ostensibly over socialism and foreign policy but in fact over which of the two groups was to control the regime. On July 30 al-Nāyif was arrested by Ṣaddām and a group of armed party activists and officers. It was agreed that al-Nāyif’s life would be spared if he left the country, and he was sent to Morocco as ambassador; al-Dāʾūd, who was then on a mission to Jordan, was instructed to remain there.

This second bloodless coup, which did not cause any disturbances in Iraq, cleared the way for the Baʿth Party to control the regime. Al-Bakr assumed the premiership in addition to the presidency and the chairmanship of the RCC. Most cabinet posts were given to Baʿth leaders. Sympathizers of the Nāyif-Dāʾūd group were removed, and a number of civil servants considered unfriendly to the regime were retired or relieved of duty. Most important, over the next few weeks some 2,000 to 3,000 army and air force officers were forced to retire, being regarded as a security risk by the ruling party. Most were supporters of Nasser, who, despite the best efforts of the regime, maintained a following within the military until his death in 1970.

The Interim Constitution was issued in September 1968. It provided for an essentially presidential system composed of the RCC, the cabinet, and the National Assembly. Until the National Assembly was called, the RCC exercised both executive and legislative powers and, occasionally, judicial powers as well. After November 1969, with few exceptions, RCC members were elected or nominated out of the RL. In this way the civilian party—now in reality led by Vice President Ṣaddām Ḥussein—was able to eventually remove all army officers from power and maintain control. In the state as a whole, the Baʿth Party, already highly organized, began to infiltrate and influence almost all national organizations.

Disturbances in the Kurdish area and several attempts to overthrow the regime kept the Baʿth leaders preoccupied and prevented them from launching planned social and economic programs. The attempts to overthrow the regime were suppressed without difficulty, but the Kurdish problem proved more complicated.

Even before the Baʿth Party achieved power, the Kurdish question had been discussed in several meetings of the Baʿth Party leadership. However, in late 1968 fighting between the Kurds and the Iraqi army began once again and escalated to full-scale warfare. With military aid provided by Iran, the Kurds were able to pose a serious threat to the Baʿth regime. By early 1970 negotiations between the Baʿth leaders, with Ṣaddām as chief government negotiator, the Kurdish leader Muṣṭafā al-Barzānī, and other leaders of the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) were under way. The government agreed to officially recognize the Kurds as a “national” group entitled to a form of autonomous status called self-rule. This would eventually lead to the establishment of a provincial administrative council and an assembly to deal with Kurdish affairs. The agreement was proclaimed in the Manifesto of March 1970, to go into effect in March 1974, following a census to determine the frontiers of the area in which the Kurds formed the majority of the population.

In April 1972 Iraq and the Soviet Union signed a treaty in which the two countries agreed to cooperate in political, economic, and military affairs. The Soviet Union also agreed to supply Iraq with arms.

To strengthen the Baʿth regime, two important steps were taken. First, the conflict with the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP), which had arisen after the revolution of 1958 and had led to the death of thousands of communists under Baʿth rule, was reconciled. Second, the National Progressive Front was established to provide legitimacy to the regime by enlisting the support of other political parties. Since the March Manifesto had established a basis for settling the Kurdish problem, Kurdish political parties were willing to participate in the National Progressive Front (NPF). The ICP had also shown interest. A Charter for National Action, prepared by the Baʿth Party, was published in the press for public discussion and became the basis for cooperation with the ICP and other parties.

In March 1972 Baʿthist and ICP leaders met to discuss the content of the charter and express their views about basic principles such as socialism, democracy, and economic development. A statute was drawn up expressing the principles agreed on as the basis for cooperation among the parties of the NPF. It also provided for a 16-member central executive committee, called the High Committee, and a secretariat. The NPF officially came into existence in 1973.

In 1973–74 negotiations with al-Barzānī and the KDP to implement the March Manifesto failed. The census promised in the March Manifesto had not been taken, and al-Barzānī and the KDP refused to accept the Baʿthist determination of the borders of the Kurdish area, which excluded the oil-rich Karkūk province. Nevertheless, in March 1974 the Baʿth regime proceeded to implement its own plan for self-rule, establishing a provincial council and an assembly in cooperation with Kurdish leaders who were opposed to al-Barzānī’s militant approach. Iraq also set up the Kurdish Autonomous Region in the three predominantly Kurdish governorates of Arbīl, Dahūk, and Al-Sulaymāniyyah.

The Kurdish war started in March 1974. Al-Barzānī’s decision to go to war with the Baʿth government seems to have been made with the support of the shah of Iran, who sought to pressure Iraq to alter the water frontier in the Shaṭṭ al-ʿArab to the thalweg, or the deepest point of the river. (Under the terms of the 1937 treaty, the boundary was set at the low-water mark on the Iranian side, giving Iraq control of the shipping channel.) Soon after the conflict broke out, however, an agreement between Iran and Iraq caused Iran to suspend support for the Kurds and ended the Kurdish war. Al-Barzānī’s forces and political supporters were given a few days to withdraw into Iran, and the Iraqi government took full control of Iraqi Kurdistan.

Relations between the Baʿth regime and the ICP deteriorated after 1975. Baʿth policies were openly criticized in the communist press. Many communists were arrested, and by 1979 most of the principal ICP leaders were either in prison or had left Iraq. The absence of communist representation deprived the NPF of an opposition party that was willing to voice dissent on fundamental issues.

Foreign policy 1968–80

The Baʿth Party came to power, to a large extent, on the waves of deep popular frustration that followed the Arab defeat by Israel in the Six-Day War. The party soon became, rhetorically, the most extreme anti-Israeli regime in the Arab world, promising to quickly conduct a successful war to wrest Palestine from Israeli control. The Baʿth retained, and even reinforced, a large and expensive expeditionary force in Jordan, yet it vitiated its own agenda by alienating virtually every regime in the Arab world. The party was extremely unpopular inside Iraq because of its disastrous experience in 1963, and both the public and the military were still to a large extent under the influence of Nasser. The party believed that, by besmirching the Egyptian leader, it could gain public support. It called on Nasser to resign for having failed the Arab world in the war and for having rejected Iraq’s demand to launch another, immediate attack. Relations with Baʿthist Syria also became tense. The oil monarchies of the Persian Gulf were wary of Baʿth social, national, and anti-Western radicalism, fearing Iraq might inspire revolutionary activities in their countries, and, indeed, the Baʿth regime called for Baʿth-style revolutions throughout the Arab world.

Beginning in the spring of 1969, relations with the Iranian monarchy also deteriorated over control of the Shaṭṭ al-ʿArab and over Iranian support for Iraq’s Kurdish rebels. Relations remained cordial, though reserved, only with Jordan, because Iraq needed Jordanian cooperation in order to keep Iraqi forces in that country. During a clash between the Jordanian government and the Palestine Liberation Organization in September 1970, the Iraqi government decided to avoid a confrontation with Jordanian troops (despite earlier promises to aid the Palestinians) and withdrew its forces east, into the Jordanian desert. This won them harsh criticism from the Palestinians and from Arab radicals in general. However, it could not save their relations with Jordan, which during the next few years reached a nadir.

Beginning in 1974–75, under the direction of Ṣaddām, Iraq’s relations with its neighbours started to improve. The young vice president realized that the country’s near total isolation was threatening the regime’s hold on power. The crucial turnaround took place in 1975 when Iraq and Iran signed the Algiers Agreement, in which Iraq agreed to move the maritime boundary between the two countries to the thalweg—conditioned on Iran’s withdrawal of support for the Iraqi Kurds. This was followed by improved relations with most gulf states, and in 1975 Egypt’s new president, Anwar el-Sādāt, and The Sudan’s president, Gaafar Mohamed el-Nimeiri, each visited Baghdad. In the years that followed, relations with Jordan and Turkey also improved dramatically.

Besides Israel, the only close neighbour with which Iraq did not experience improved relations was Syria. Tension between the two Baʿthist regimes increased throughout the 1970s, and both sought to undermine the other. In 1976, as part of a dispute over oil-transfer revenues, Iraq stopped shipping oil through Syrian pipelines, opting rather to use a newer pipeline across Turkey. That this ongoing dispute conflicted with the Baʿthist’s pan-Arab rhetoric apparently was of little importance: the main task for Ṣaddām was to keep the Baʿth Party in power in Baghdad, and the destabilizing influence of the Syrian branch of the party was something he could not afford. Only by denigrating the Syrian regime—as Ṣaddām frequently did—by accusing it of betraying the party’s ideals and of colluding with Israel could he clearly signal members of his own branch of the party that involvement with Syria would lead to charges of treason.

Throughout the 1970s, while Iraq’s anti-Israeli rhetoric reached a crescendo, the Baʿth regime in Baghdad also began to play down its commitment to any immediate war against Israel. As Ṣaddām explained it to his domestic audience, the Arabs were not ready for such a war, because there was a need to first achieve strategic superiority over the Jewish state. Ṣaddām’s vision was that Iraq first would concentrate exclusively on economic, technological, and military growth, turning itself into a “fortress.” Only when Iraq was ready would it turn outside, “radiating” its influence to the Arab world. Only then, under Iraq’s leadership, would the Arabs be ready to confront Israel. In fact, there was a notable leap in almost every sector of Iraq’s economy and in military expansion during the late 1970s. This military development also included Iraq’s first meaningful investment in nuclear and biological weapons research.

Economic development to 1980

Perhaps the greatest assets of the Baʿth regime were the ambitious plans for reconstruction and development laid down by its leaders. The struggle for power during 1958–68 had left little time for constructive work, and the Baʿth Party sought not only to transform the economic system from free enterprise to collectivism but also to assert the country’s economic independence. The immediate objectives were to increase production and to raise the standard of living, but the ultimate objective was to establish a socialist society in which all citizens would enjoy the benefits of progress and prosperity. On the other hand, the regime’s socioeconomic program was an effective way of controlling the population. Critics of the regime have defined this system as combining “intimidation and enticement” (al-tarhīb wa al-targhīb): along with building a huge and extremely brutal internal-security apparatus, the regime expended the country’s vast oil revenues to create an extensive welfare system and to extend roads, electric grids, and water-purification systems to much of the countryside.

The five-year economic plans of 1965–70 and 1971–75 concentrated on raising the level of production in both agriculture and industry and aimed at reducing dependence on oil revenues as the primary source for development. But agriculture lagged far behind target goals, and industrial development was slow. The five-year plan of 1976–80, formulated in the years after Iraq’s oil revenues had suddenly quadrupled, was far more ambitious. Development goals in virtually every category were intended to increase, reaching two and even three times the levels of previous plans. Altogether the allocation for development compared with previous plans increased more than 10-fold, eventually reaching some one-third of the general budget. Ideologically, the regime now sought to legitimize itself through economic development rather than through extremist revolutionary rhetoric, as it had done previously. In practice, however, the funds may have been available to meet these goals, but the country’s inadequate infrastructure made implementation unachievable. Also, though many large industrial plants were constructed, production was inefficient, and Iraqi state products could compete on the world markets only in situations where Iraq had a meaningful advantage, such as in products that directly exploited the country’s petroleum surplus.

Baʿth leaders considered nationalizing the oil industry their greatest achievement. Between 1969 and 1972 several agreements with foreign powers—the Soviet Union and others—were concluded to provide the Iraq National Oil Company (INOC) with the capital and technical skills to exploit the oil fields. In 1972 operation started at the highly productive North Rumaylah field, and an Iraqi Oil Tankers Company was established to deliver oil to several foreign countries. Also in 1972 the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC) was nationalized (with compensation), and a national company, the Iraqi Company for Oil Operations, was established to operate the fields. In 1973, when the Yom Kippur War broke out, Iraq nationalized American and Dutch companies, and in 1975 it nationalized the remaining foreign interests in the Basra Petroleum Company.

The initial step in agrarian reform had been taken with the Agrarian Reform Law of 1958, which provided for distributing to peasants lands in excess of a certain maximum ownership. A decade later less than half of the land had been distributed. In 1969 a revised Agrarian Reform Law relieved the peasants from payments for their land by abolishing compensation to landowners, and a year later a new Agrarian Reform Law was designed to improve the conditions of the peasantry, increase agricultural production, and correlate development in rural and urban areas. The results were disappointing, however, because of the difficulty officials had in persuading the peasants to stay on their farms and because of their inability to improve the quality of agricultural production. The Baʿth regime also completed work on irrigation projects that had already been under way and began new projects in areas where water was likely to be scarce in the summer. In the five-year plan of 1976–80, funds were allocated for completion of dams on the Euphrates, Tigris, Diyālā, and upper Zab rivers and Lake al-Tharthār.

Recognizing that a rapid transition to full socialism was neither possible nor in the country’s best interest, the Baʿth provided for a sector (albeit a small one) for private investors, and a third, mixed sector was created in which private and public enterprises could cooperate. This three-tier economy, however, provided fertile ground for official corruption, and senior government officials received illicit commissions for approving deals between the public and private sectors.

Iraq under Ṣaddām Ḥussein

From the early 1970s Ṣaddām was widely recognized as the power behind President al-Bakr, who after 1977 was little more than a figurehead. Ṣaddām reached this position through his leadership of the internal security apparatus, a post that most senior Baʿthist figures had been too squeamish to fill. Ṣaddām, however, had drawn hard lessons from the party’s failure in 1963 and resolved that no dissent should be allowed in party ranks, no opposition outside the party should be tolerated, and ideological commitment to party ideals alone was insufficient to guarantee the loyalty of internal security officers. Kinship bonds were, to him, much more promising. President al-Bakr concurred on that issue, and soon after the Baʿth takeover al-Bakr appointed his young relative (both al-Bakr and Ṣaddām belonged to the tribe of Āl Bū Nāṣir) to the powerful posts of deputy chairman of the RCC, deputy secretary-general of the RL, and vice president. Al-Bakr also allowed Ṣaddām to form the Presidential Guard, mostly from members of the Āl Bū Nāṣir and allied Sunni tribes. Between 1968 and the mid-1970s Ṣaddām became the unchallenged leader of internal security. After he jailed, executed, or assassinated the regime’s opponents, he turned against his own opponents inside the ruling party, using the same tools and methods: a plethora of ubiquitous and ruthless internal security organs loyal to him personally.

It was virtually taken for granted that when al-Bakr relinquished the presidency, Ṣaddām would succeed him. Nevertheless, his succession was not carried out without complications. Perhaps the two most important complicating factors were Egyptian President Sādāt’s decision to make peace with Israel and Syrian President Ḥāfiẓ al-Assad’s bid for economic and political union with Iraq. These two events were not unrelated. Despite ongoing tensions between the two branches of the Baʿth Party, Arab unity had been a long-standing party goal in both Syria and Iraq. Assad, however, was prompted to call for union with Iraq only after Egypt’s rapprochement with Israel in 1977. While President al-Bakr hesitated, Ṣaddām strongly resisted this move. After Egypt and Israel signed the Camp David Accords in 1978, however, there was no way he could avoid the issue.

The initial negotiations showed great promise. Talks in October 1978 led to the signing of a “charter for joint national action,” which declared the two countries’ intent to establish military unity. By 1979 it was clear that the eventual aim was full political union. Iraq and Syria also cooperated with other Arab leaders in taking a firm stand against Sādāt. By March 1979, however, when Sādāt signed a peace treaty with Israel, negotiations for a Syro-Iraqi union had slowed. The main stumbling block was the question of whether the leadership of the unified state would be primarily Syrian or Iraqi.

Relations between the two countries deteriorated, and by that time Ṣaddām had an additional reason for avoiding ties with Damascus: Iran’s Islamic revolution had installed a regime that was clearly anti-Iraqi and had close ties with Syria. The Iraqi regime also saw a vague religious threat, inasmuch as many among Syria’s ruling elite adhered to a branch of Shīʿism (the ʿAlawī sect) that was faintly related to that practiced in revolutionary Iran. Given Iraq’s large—and for the most part disfranchised—Shīʿite population, Baghdad perceived relations between Syria and Iran as an unprecedented threat.

On July 16, 1979, the eve of the anniversary of the revolution of 1968, al-Bakr officially announced his resignation. There is little doubt that Ṣaddām forced him to resign. Al-Bakr was placed under de facto house arrest and died in 1982. Ṣaddām immediately succeeded him as president, chairman of the RCC, secretary-general of the RL, and commander in chief of the armed forces.

Less than two weeks after Ṣaddām claimed leadership, it was announced that a plot to overthrow the government had been uncovered. This announcement had been preceded some days earlier by the arrest of Muḥyī ʿAbd al-Ḥusayn al-Mashhadī, the secretary of the RCC (and, uncoincidentally, a Shīʿite). Mashhadī made a public confession that was, in all likelihood, coerced. He stated that he and other Baʿth leaders, including four other members of the RCC, in collaboration with the Syrian government, had conspired to overthrow the regime. It is doubtful such a conspiracy existed, and it is unclear why those individuals were eliminated—all had been, at one time or another, protégés of Ṣaddām. However, they had opposed al-Bakr’s resignation and Ṣaddām’s ascendancy to the presidency. Thus, Ṣaddām had finally managed to abort rapprochement between Iraq and Syria and, at the same time, send a message to all party members that the new president would not tolerate even the slightest dissent. A special court was set up, and 22 other senior officials were tried and executed; a number of others were sentenced to prison terms.

Syria denied complicity in any plot, but Ṣaddām accused it of planning acts of sabotage and murder, and the Syrian ambassador and his staff were expelled. The Syrians reciprocated. With the de facto termination of diplomatic ties, economic relations between the two Baʿthist regimes started to deteriorate. In April 1982, at the height of its war with Iran, Iraq needed additional maritime outlets. Syria responded by closing its border with Iraq—ostensibly to prevent Iraqi arms smuggling—and shutting down the Iraqi-Syrian oil pipeline. A few days later Damascus officially severed diplomatic relations with Baghdad.

The Iran-Iraq War

Relations with Iran had grown increasingly strained after the shah was overthrown in 1979. Iraq recognized Iran’s new Shīʿite Islamic government, but the Iranian leaders would have nothing to do with the Baʿth regime, which they denounced as secular. Ruhollah Khomeini, the spiritual leader of the Iranian revolution, proclaimed his policy of “exporting the revolution,” and Iraq was high on the list of countries whose governments were to be overthrown and replaced by a replica of the Islamic regime in Iran. In addition, Iran still occupied three small pieces of territory along the Iran-Iraq border that were supposed to be returned to Iraq under the treaty of 1975.

The Baʿth government was highly sensitive to the Islamic threat, not merely because it was a secular regime but because the ruling elite, despite some earnest efforts at enfranchisement, consisted mainly of Sunni Arabs. By the late 1970s the Shīʿites were an overall majority in the Baʿth Party, but members of that sect were a minority in the party’s middle and upper levels. In the late 1980s Shīʿites still constituted only about one-fifth of all army general officers, and Shīʿite representation in the upper echelons of the internal security services was even lower. On the whole, Shīʿites remained aloof from the regime. This estrangement was attributable in large part to the socioeconomic gap between Sunnis and Shīʿites—the vast majority of Shīʿites being poor—but it was also a result of the regime’s desire to control fully every walk of life. This included persistent attempts to control Shīʿite religious life—including education in madrasahs (religious colleges)—a situation objectionable to traditional Shīʿites and to Iraq’s influential Shīʿite clergy, who maintained close ties with colleagues in Iran.

As long as the secular, Westernized shah ruled over Iran, traditional Iraqi Shīʿites remained politically quiescent. When Khomeini came to power in February 1979, however, his example inspired many Shīʿites in Iraq to engage in greater political activism. Mass pro-Khomeini demonstrations and guerrilla activity became regular occurrences. The man who encouraged these activities, and in whom many saw an Iraqi Khomeini, was the young and charismatic Ayatollah Muḥammad Bāqir al-Ṣadr. The regime cracked down on the Shīʿite movement with great ferocity, and hundreds were executed, some 10,000 were imprisoned, and tens of thousands were driven across the border into Iran. In April 1980 Ṣaddām ordered the execution of al-Ṣadr and his sister; by July demonstrations had ceased, and guerrilla activity had come to a virtual halt.

Still, the Baʿth regime feared that as long as Khomeini was in power, his Islamic revolution could serve as a source of inspiration for Shīʿite revolutionaries in Iraq. Further, Ṣaddām saw an assassination attempt against Ṭāriq ʿAzīz, the foreign minister and the president’s close associate, by a Shīʿite activist as an insult directed against him personally. Under normal circumstances such developments would likely never have led to war, but Khomeini had isolated himself from the international community and had crippled his own armed forces through extensive purges of the shah’s officers’ corps. In addition, when Khomeini came to power in Iran, Iraq had a large, well-organized, and well-equipped military and a fast-growing economy. No less important, it enjoyed friendly relations with most of its neighbours, and all its armed forces had since been recalled to within its own borders.

It was those conditions that convinced Ṣaddām he could win a blitz war against the less-organized and internationally isolated Iran, despite the latter’s greater size and superior natural and human resources. In doing this, the Iraqi leader’s likely goals were to remove Khomeini from power and replace his regime with one more friendly to Iraq, demarcate the border (particularly along the Shaṭṭ al-ʿArab) in Iraq’s favour, secure autonomy for Khūzestān (an oil-rich region in southwestern Iran inhabited largely by ethnic Arabs) under some Iraqi tutelage, and give Iraq hegemonic power in the Persian Gulf.

Beginning in 1979, border clashes began to occur frequently, and Ṣaddām announced in September 1980 that he was abrogating the 1975 agreements because they had been violated by Iran. Within days, Iraqi forces invaded Iran. At the same time, Iraq bombed Iranian air bases and other strategic targets. In the week following the invasion, the UN Security Council called for a cease-fire and appealed to Iran and Iraq to settle their dispute peacefully. The Iraqi president replied, saying that Iraq would accept a cease-fire provided Iran did as well. Iran’s response, however, was negative. The war thus continued and in succeeding years was extended to the gulf area. It has been aptly called the Gulf War. (The hostilities of 1991 and 2003 have also been called Gulf wars.)

The Iraqi advance into Iran was stopped in November 1980. There followed a stalemate that continued until September 1981, when Iran, which had rejected further attempts at mediation, began a series of successful offensives. By May 1982 the Iraqis had been driven from most of the captured territory. Iranian forces, having liberated the Iranian city of Khorramshahr and having lifted the siege of Ābādān, began to penetrate into Iraq’s Al-Baṣrah province. During 1982–87 they threatened the city of Al-Baṣrah and occupied Majnūn Island and the Fāw (Fao) peninsula. In its unsuccessful attempts to liberate the Fāw peninsula during February–March 1986, Iraq suffered horrific casualties. The Iranian attacks on Al-Baṣrah were repulsed with heavy casualties on both sides. Iraq countered in the so-called tanker war by bombing Iranian oil terminals in the gulf, especially on Khārk Island.

In 1987 the military balance began to favour Iraq, which had raised an army of some one million and, while Iran remained largely isolated from the international community, had obtained state-of-the-art arms from France and the Soviet Union, including thousands of artillery pieces, tanks, and armoured personnel carriers and hundreds of combat aircraft. This arsenal (enormous for a country of some 18 million inhabitants) was bolstered by the addition of substantial quantities of chemical weapons, which the regime acquired or produced throughout the 1980s. At the same time, Iraq committed substantial resources in an attempt to develop or purchase other weapons of mass destruction (WMD), including biological and nuclear arms.

Relations with the United States, which had resumed in 1984, began to improve. In 1987 the United States agreed to reflag 11 Kuwaiti tankers and escort them in international waters through the Strait of Hormuz. Britain and France also escorted tankers carrying their own flags. Although a U.S. destroyer was inadvertently attacked by an Iraqi bomber in May 1987, the United States supported Iraq, both diplomatically at the United Nations and militarily by providing information about Iranian military movements in the gulf area. In October 1987 and April 1988, U.S. forces attacked Iranian ships and oil platforms.

In July 1987 the UN Security Council had unanimously passed Resolution 598, urging Iraq and Iran to accept a cease-fire, withdraw their forces to internationally recognized boundaries, and settle their frontier disputes by negotiations held under UN auspices. Iraq agreed to abide by the terms if Iran reciprocated. Iran, however, demanded amendments condemning Iraq as the aggressor in the war (which would have held them liable for paying war reparations) and calling on all foreign navies to leave the gulf.

In the northeastern provinces Iranian forces, in cooperation with Iraqi Kurds, threatened the area from Karkūk to the Turkish border and penetrated to the Iraqi towns of Hājj ʿUmrān and Ḥalabjah. They met with stiff resistance in the north, however. Using chemical weapons, Iraqi forces inflicted heavy casualties on Kurdish civilians in and around Ḥalabjah in March 1988.

Military operations in the gulf resumed, and in April 1988 Iraq—this time using chemical weapons against the Iranian troops—recaptured the Fāw peninsula. Later it liberated the districts of Salamcha and Majnūn, and in July Iraqi forces once again penetrated deep into Iran. It became clear that Iran’s military position in the gulf had become untenable, and it accepted Resolution 598, which came into force on August 20, 1988. The war had been one of the most destructive conflicts of the late 20th century. Hundreds of thousands had died, and large areas of western Iran and southeastern Iraq had been devastated.

When the foreign ministers of Iraq and Iran met for the first time in Geneva in August 1988 and later in 1989, there was no progress on how Resolution 598 was to be implemented. Iraq demanded the full exchange of prisoners as the first step, while Iran insisted that withdrawing Iraqi forces from Iran should precede the exchange of prisoners. (The last prisoners were not exchanged until 2003, as many Iraqi Shīʿites had been fearful of returning home.) The border dispute remained an ongoing point of friction between the two countries, even though Iran eventually allowed Iraq to make limited use of the Shaṭṭ al-ʿArab. In 1990 Iraq implied that it was ready to return to the 1975 agreement, but nothing came of the overture. Occasional diplomatic initiatives were afterward interlaced with small-scale military incidents along the border. Each country supported opposition groups that worked against the rival’s government. Iraq sheltered the Mojāhedīn-e Khalq—an Iranian extremist group—and Iran lent support to various Iraqi Shīʿite groups. Guerrilla attacks and terrorist incidents were frequent in the years after the war.

Postwar policies

Articles 47 to 56 of the interim Iraqi constitution provided for a legislative assembly, and—in an effort to garner popular support during the war—elections (the first in postrevolutionary Iraq) were held in June 1980. The new National Assembly convened 10 days later, and subsequent elections were held in 1984 and 1989. Regardless, the Assembly was vested with little power. Only those supporting the Baʿth revolution were allowed to stand for office, and in disputes between the Assembly and the RCC, the latter’s decisions were final. Moreover, after Ṣaddām’s rise to the presidency, the RCC itself had become increasingly irrelevant and eventually served as little more than a rubber stamp for the president’s decisions. Within the Baʿth Party meaningful political debate did continue, but only on topics selected by the president, and all presidential decisions were final.

After the cease-fire, Iraq began a program of reconstruction, concentrating on the areas that had suffered most during the war, but the country had little ready cash. Iraq, now deeply in debt, continued to spend large sums on armaments, and inflation and unemployment soared. To relieve social pressures, the government made it easier for people to travel abroad, but few were able to take advantage of this policy. In addition, the government promised to open the political process by allowing multiparty elections and greater press freedoms. The draft constitution prepared in late 1989 was scrutinized by the RCC before it reached the National Assembly for approval and was about to be submitted to a public plebiscite when Iraq invaded Kuwait. Thereafter, the entire democratic plan was shelved.

To enhance Iraq’s position in the Arab world, Ṣaddām had begun to negotiate a set of bilateral agreements with his neighbours. Early in 1989 he had concluded nonaggression pacts with Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. He also had established the Arab Cooperation Council with Jordan, Egypt, and Yemen to promote economic and cultural development.

Peace negotiations with Iran had not brought about a settlement, and Ṣaddām—despite Iraq’s overwhelming military edge over Iran—continued to purchase weapons. Iraq’s rearmament program included expensive programs to develop missiles and chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. Criticism in the West of Iraq’s record on human rights and the county’s acquisition of sensitive military technology prompted Ṣaddām to make highly inflammatory speeches about the hostile Western attitude. In April 1990 he warned that if Israel ever again attacked Iraq (as that country had attacked and destroyed Iraq’s Osiraq-Tammuz nuclear plant in 1981), he would retaliate with chemical weapons. This threat was later extended to include an attack by Israel on any Arab state, and Ṣaddām soon began to suggest that Iraq’s eventual goal was to defeat Israel and capture Jerusalem. These declarations were the first indications that the Iraqi regime had wider territorial aspirations and portended the invasion of Kuwait less than a year later.

The Persian Gulf War

Causes

Iraq characterized its war with Iran as a defensive action against the spread of the Islamic revolution not only to Iraq but to other gulf countries and to the wider Arab world and portrayed itself as “the eastern gate to the Arab homeland.” Ṣaddām thus anticipated that the large war debt incurred by Iraq—much of it owed to the Persian Gulf monarchies—would be forgiven. He even expected the gulf countries to finance his reconstruction program, as the United States had financed the reconstruction of western Europe through the Marshall Plan. The Iraqi leadership was greatly angered when it saw support from the gulf Arab states dwindle after the war ended. Although Iraq’s major financier, Kuwait, was willing to forgive the war debt—apparently for domestic considerations—it was reluctant to announce such an action to the world banking community. Tensions with Iraq grew further when several gulf states, including Kuwait, exceeded their oil-production quotas set by the Organization for Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). This resulted in a sharp drop in world oil prices, costing Iraq substantial amounts of income. Suspecting that the increase in oil production was prompted by Western pressure, the Iraqi president criticized Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates for undermining his country’s position, and he brought the matter to the attention of OPEC. The oil price for 1990 was raised, but suspicion and lack of cooperation still prevailed.

There were, however, other reasons for disagreement. Iraq was suspected by most gulf countries of having political ambitions, possibly including domination over some of the countries in the region. More specifically, Iraq held that it had historical claim to Kuwait’s sovereignty dating to 1871, when the ruler of Kuwait was appointed subgovernor under Midhat Paşa. This claim had been pressed in 1961 during the Qāsim regime but had met with strong resistance by other Arab states and the broader international community. Yet Iraq’s failure to ratify former agreements left room for further claims, and it sought additional border compromises, particularly control of the islands of Būbiyān and Warbah, the possession of which Iraq saw as crucial to defending its port at Umm Qaṣr.

Iraq’s historic claims, the grievances that arose from the Iran-Iraq War, and Ṣaddām’s desire to obtain strategic territory set the stage for confrontation, and these tensions were exacerbated when Iraq accused Kuwait of drilling horizontally into Iraq’s Al-Rumaylah oil field and thereby, allegedly, stealing Iraqi oil. Feeling itself the aggrieved party, Iraq demanded a long-term commitment by Kuwait not to exceed its OPEC quota and further demanded that Kuwait and Saudi Arabia provide Iraq considerable economic aid. Kuwait initially acceded to the first demand (later, however, only for a three-month production limit), and Kuwait and Saudi Arabia agreed to provide Iraq with aid.

Given the decline of the Soviet Union, the Iraqis assumed that the United States would not see an occupation of Kuwait as a Soviet bid to control the Persian Gulf. Further, the Iraqi leader had made it clear to the Americans that Iraq would guarantee, at a reasonable price, a continued supply of oil from the gulf. American military intervention seemed unlikely—certainly not as long as the other Arab states accepted the fait accompli of an occupation—and it was believed that an invasion of Kuwait would solve Iraq’s two main problems: the urgent need for cash and the desire to control Būbiyān and Warbah. It also had the promise of giving Iraq the hegemony in the Persian Gulf that it desired.

The invasion

On August 2, 1990, Iraqi forces invaded Kuwait. On the same day, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 660, condemning the invasion and demanding Iraq’s unconditional withdrawal. It also called on Iraq and Kuwait to begin immediate negotiations. On August 6 the Security Council passed Resolution 661, imposing economic sanctions against Iraq that consisted of a wide-ranging trade embargo.

Ṣaddām showed no sign that he was prepared to withdraw from Kuwait, and on August 8 Iraq declared Kuwait to be its 19th province. U.S. President George Bush and various allies, considering Iraq’s action an act of blatant aggression as well as a threat to Western interests, decided that the status quo ante had to be reestablished, and U.S. troops began arriving in Saudi Arabia the next day. A 28-member coalition, including several Middle Eastern countries and led by the United States, mobilized sufficient military and political support to enforce the Security Council’s sanctions, including the use of force. The coalition demanded that Iraq withdraw from Kuwait by no later than January 15, 1991, but the Iraqis seemed unconvinced that coalition forces would actually attack and felt assured that, in the event of an attack, the large and well-equipped Iraqi military would hold up against U.S. and coalition forces long enough to inflict heavy combat casualties and sap American political resolve.

The coalition began air operations on January 17 and on February 24 commenced a full-scale ground offensive on all fronts. The Iraqi military crumbled rapidly and capitulated after less than one week of fighting on the ground. The defeat compelled Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait and accept the Security Council resolutions.

The military operations not only destroyed much of the Iraqi armed forces but also severely damaged the infrastructure of the major Iraqi cities and towns. The defeat encouraged the Shīʿite and Kurdish populations to rebel against the regime. In its action against the Shīʿites, the government forces killed many people and caused extensive damage. The attempt by Iraqi forces to reconquer Kurdistan forced more than a million Kurds to flee to Turkey and Iran. Many died from hunger and disease. Only with Western intervention did the Kurdish refugees feel they could return to their homes in northern Iraq. In April 1991 the United States, the United Kingdom, and France established a “safe haven” in Iraqi Kurdistan, in which Iraqi forces were barred from operating. Within a short time the Kurds had established autonomous rule, and two main Kurdish factions—the KDP in the north and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) in the south—contended with one another for control. This competition encouraged the Baʿthist regime to attempt to direct affairs in the Kurdish Autonomous Region by various means, including military force. The Iraqi military launched a successful attack against the Kurdish city of Arbīl in 1996 and engaged in a consistent policy of ethnic cleansing in areas directly under its control—particularly in and around the oil-rich city of Karkūk—that were inhabited predominantly by Kurds and other minorities.

Iraq’s Shīʿite population fared even worse than the Kurds. Pressure on Shīʿite leaders to support the Baʿthist regime had begun even before the Iran-Iraq War, and, although their failure at that time to endorse Ṣaddām’s regime led to frequent attacks on Shīʿites and their institutions—Shīʿite leaders were killed and imprisoned, madrasahs were closed, and public religious ceremonies were banned—most Shīʿites had served faithfully in the armed forces against Iran and shouldered an inordinate amount of the fighting. Only after the Persian Gulf War did the Shīʿites rise up against the regime, and their rebellion was put down with great brutality. The U.S.-led coalition did not establish a safe haven for the Shīʿites in southern Iraq, and the regime subsequently put immense resources into excavating several large canals to drain the country’s southern marshes, which had been the traditional stronghold of the Shīʿites. The regime allegedly killed scores of prominent Shīʿite religious and political leaders and arrested and imprisoned thousands of others whom they accused of sedition.

Within those regions of Iraq still controlled by the regime, Ṣaddām’s control of society was strengthened by his continued domination of the country’s internal security services, which had grown steadily since the 1970s and, under his close direction, had become a ubiquitous part of life in Iraq. Although the Shīʿites and Kurds suffered the regime’s greatest wrath, enemies, or perceived enemies, of the Iraqi leader were consistently rooted out even among the Sunni Arab elite—including members of Ṣaddām’s own family. All were dealt with brutally. The Iraqi leader survived several coup attempts in the 1990s, some of which were launched by disaffected members of the Sunni community, but the effectiveness of the security apparatus was proved time and again by its ability to preempt most attacks before they occurred and unfailingly to keep Ṣaddām in power.

The UN embargo and oil-for-food program

The UN-imposed economic embargo on Iraq remained in force during the Persian Gulf War but expired after Iraq withdrew from Kuwait. Since Iraq had refused to withdraw voluntarily, however, in April 1991 the Security Council adopted Resolution 687, which made lifting the embargo conditional on Iraq’s accepting the demarcation of the Iraq-Kuwait border according to their bilateral agreement of October 1963, surrendering all its WMD, including missiles with ranges greater than 90 miles (150 km), and destroying the ability to create such weapons. The resolution also called for the establishment of a monitoring system, to guarantee Iraq’s compliance.

The Security Council established a UN Special Commission (UNSCOM) to inspect and verify that Iraq was complying with the ban on WMD. By mid-1991, however, it was becoming clear that the embargo would very likely last longer than had been originally expected and that, in the meantime, the people of Iraq needed humanitarian aid. Thus, the Security Council passed a pair of resolutions establishing what came to be called the oil-for-food program, in which Iraq, under UN supervision, could sell a set amount of oil in order to purchase food, medicine, and other necessities.

The government of Iraq, however, rejected this offer on the grounds that it violated Iraq’s national sovereignty. In addition, between 1991 and 1993 Iraq continually obstructed UNSCOM’s search for WMD. The United States and the United Kingdom (and originally France) responded by carrying out intermittent air attacks on Iraqi military and internal security targets. Gradually, however, the Iraqi regime managed to render UNSCOM’s work almost ineffectual. In the end the Iraqis argued that all of their proscribed weapons had been destroyed, although UNSCOM insisted that the Iraqi regime was still concealing a small stockpile of prohibited items and technology. Despite ongoing Iraqi recalcitrance, the Security Council adopted new measures, which Iraq accepted only under the threat of economic collapse in 1996. In December Iraq resumed oil exports, and the first food and medicine shipments arrived in Iraq in March 1997.

In February 1998 the Security Council again raised the ceiling of the permitted sales of Iraqi oil, but Iraq continued to obstruct the work of UNSCOM, and there were fears that the country had resumed its programs for WMD, despite UNSCOM’s verification and inspection efforts. In December 1998 the United States and the United Kingdom attacked military and government targets within Iraq—primarily those suspected of being associated with WMD—in the most intense bombardment since the 1991 war.

Following the raids, however, Iraq refused to allow UNSCOM personnel to reenter the country. Iraqi leaders also rejected a new, more liberal, resolution put forward in late 1999 and instead demanded that sanctions be lifted completely. By then, however, the embargo’s effectiveness had begun to diminish. The easing of sanctions alone had allowed a greater degree of prosperity, and Iraq smuggled an increasing volume of material, particularly oil, to generate income, bring in proscribed items, and fuel consumer demands. This was facilitated by the fact that a number of countries, particularly those adjoining Iraq, derived great financial benefit from trade with that country.

In light of the deteriorating embargo—and always observant of the humanitarian toll that it produced—a number of states within the UN called for its complete abolition. Others sought to streamline the embargo by introducing what were termed “smart sanctions” that would be directed at prohibiting access to a much smaller, more specific list of materials to Iraq, including weapons and military technology. Iraq, however, refused such a program and again was able to have modifications to the existing sanctions sidelined within the UN, but it was unable to have sanctions lifted completely.

The Iraq War

Debate rapidly shifted, however, following a series of deadly terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001 (see September 11 attacks). No clear connection was made linking Iraq with the attacks, but U.S. President George W. Bush argued that the attacks demonstrated the vulnerability of the United States and that this vulnerability, combined with Iraq’s antipathy for the United States, its desire to obtain or manufacture WMD, and its record of supporting terrorist groups, made the complete disarming of Iraq a renewed priority. At the insistence of the United States, the UN Security Council issued Resolution 1441 on November 8, 2002, demanding that Iraq readmit inspectors and comply with all previous resolutions. After some initial wrangling, Iraq agreed to readmit inspectors, who began arriving in Iraq within two weeks.

The international community soon differed on the degree of Iraq’s cooperation. Initial inspections were inconclusive, though a small block of countries led by the United States and the United Kingdom argued that Iraq had resorted to its earlier practices, that it was willfully hindering inspection efforts, and that, given the large volume of material unaccounted for from previous inspections, it doubtless continued to conceal large quantities of proscribed weapons. Other countries, particularly France, Germany, and Russia, sought to extend inspections and give the Iraqis further time to comply. The United States and the United Kingdom, however, were convinced that Iraq never intended full cooperation and began to mass troops and war matériel around Iraq in preparation for a military conflict.

On March 17, 2003, the United States and its allies declared an end to negotiations, and on March 20 they launched the first in a series of precision air attacks on targets in Iraq, followed by an invasion of American and British ground forces from Kuwait in the south. As U.S. troops drove northward, they met resistance that was sometimes heavy but was generally poorly organized. On April 9 resistance in Baghdad collapsed, and U.S. soldiers took control of the city. On that same day, British forces secured Al-Baṣrah, and Iraq’s other major cities fell within days, sparking a short but intense period of rampant looting of stores and government buildings. Major fighting ended by late April, but acts of common criminality continued, and, as the months passed, a pattern of concerted guerrilla warfare began to unfold. On December 13, 2003, Ṣaddām surrendered to U.S. troops when he was found hiding near Tikrīt, and other major figures from the regime were tracked down and arrested.

Following the fall of the Baʿth Party, an entity known as the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), which was headed by a senior American diplomat, assumed the governance of Iraq. An Iraqi governing council appointed by the CPA had limited powers. The primary goal of the CPA was to maintain security and rebuild Iraq’s badly damaged and deteriorated infrastructure, but its efforts were widely hampered by an escalating insurgency involving a variety of groups comprising both Iraqis and non-Iraqi fighters from other Arab and Islamic countries. Prominent among them were remnants of the former Baʿthist regime as well as a group under the control of Abū Muṣʿab al-Zarqāwī, a Jordanian-born militant linked to al-Qaeda, the terrorist organization behind the September 11 attacks.

Responsible for countless killings and sabotage, the insurgents targeted coalition forces, new Iraqi security forces and recruitment centres, electrical installations, oil pipelines, and other civilian institutions. The resistance was concentrated mainly in Baghdad and the Sunni-dominated areas north and west of the capital, especially in Al-Fallūjah. A push by U.S. and central government forces failed to gain control of that city in April 2004, but a renewed effort succeeded in November. Major confrontations between coalition and government forces and those loyal to Muqtadā al-Ṣadr, a radical Shīʿite cleric, also occurred south of Baghdad, mainly in Al-Najaf and Karbalāʾ.

Meanwhile, efforts to hand over control of the government to the Iraqis continued. In June 2004 the CPA and the governing council were dissolved, and political authority passed to an interim government headed by Ghāzī al-Yāwar. Subsequently Ayād ʿAllāwī was selected prime minister. U.S. and coalition forces remained. Although no WMD were unearthed, the discovery of mass graves and records found in the offices of Baʿthist intelligence services bore witness to the human toll of the atrocities committed by Ṣaddām’s regime. Ironically, revelations of assault and mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad brought their own international outcry. On January 30, 2005, despite the ongoing violence, general elections were successfully held for Iraq’s new 275-member Transitional National Assembly. Iraqis around the world were allowed to vote in absentia. In April 2005 Kurdish leader Jalāl Ṭālabānī was elected president of Iraq.

A draft constitution approved by a national referendum in October 2005 called for a new legislature, the members of which largely would be elected from constituent districts (some members would be appointed). Sunni Arabs voted overwhelmingly against the new constitution, fearing that it would make them a perpetual minority. In a general election on December 15, the Shīʿite United Iraqi Alliance (UIA) gained the most seats but not enough to call a government. After four months of political wrangling, Nūrī al-Mālikī of the Shīʿite party Islamic Daʿwah formed a coalition government that included both Arabs and Kurds. Ṭālabānī, who was reelected as president in April 2006, nominated Mālikī as head of the new government, which was sworn in on May 20, 2006.

Political violence continued to grow. Attacks directed at coalition forces, which had begun to rise in 2005, became even more violent and sophisticated. Yet it was attacks against Iraqi civilians, mostly in and around Baghdad, that consumed the attention of the international community as Shīʿite and Sunni militia and terror groups targeted members of the opposite group. Many of these attacks were directed at the police and their families; even with U.S. assistance, the Iraqi government had a difficult time recruiting and training police officers and soldiers to assume domestic security duties. The death of Zarqāwī in June 2006 did nothing to reduce the violence.

Ṣaddām was executed by an Iraqi court on December 30, 2006. Shortly thereafter, President Bush proposed a controversial plan to temporarily increase U.S. troop levels by more than 20,000 to help stem the flow of violence—an effort that became known as the surge. By that time, Iraqis had grown increasingly weary of the violence, and American support for the war, which had come to be called simply the Iraq War, reached an all-time low.

Levels of violence in Iraq began to decline during 2007, and some of the additional troops deployed by the United States were withdrawn. The declining levels of violence were attributed not only to the surge itself but to a confluence of factors, including the Sunni Awakening—a movement in which Sunni tribesmen who had formerly fought against U.S. troops eventually realigned themselves to help counter other insurgents, particularly those affiliated with al-Qaeda—as well as a voluntary cease-fire observed by Ṣadr and his forces.

In November 2008 an agreement that determined a timetable for the final withdrawal of U.S. forces, which had been under negotiation for nearly a year, was approved by the Iraqi parliament. Under that agreement, U.S. troops were scheduled to leave the cities and towns by mid-2009, and withdrawal from the country was set to be completed in early 2012. In February 2009 newly elected U.S. President Barack Obama announced that U.S. combat forces would be withdrawn from Iraq by the end of August 2010, with the remaining troops due to pull out by December 2011. On June 30, 2009, after turning security responsibilities over to Iraqi forces, U.S. troops completed their withdrawal from the country’s cities and towns as scheduled.

Iraq’s parliamentary election was held in March 2010. Former prime minister ʿAllāwī’s secular coalition won 91 seats, more than any other group, and narrowly defeated Prime Minister Mālikī’s coalition, which secured 89 seats in the election. Even before results were released, Mālikī requested a recount, which was denied; after the results were released, he continued to mount legal challenges to ʿAllāwī’s apparent victory, resulting in a power struggle that left Iraq without a government for much of 2010. Mālikī’s position was strengthened in October 2010 when the coalition led by Ṣadr, in a reversal, nominated Mālikī for a second term as prime minister.

In November 2010, after an eight-month political stalemate, Iraq’s major political parties entered a power-sharing agreement that paved the way for a national unity government. ʿAllāwī’s coalition agreed to join the Mālikī government, with Mālikī remaining prime minister and with a member of ʿAllāwī’s coalition becoming the speaker of the parliament. In December a new cabinet was sworn in. However, no ministers were appointed for the defense, interior, and national security ministries, as the parties had been unable to negotiate an agreement regarding the heavily contested security portfolios. Mālikī was made acting head of each of those ministries until a compromise could be reached.

In February 2011, protests erupted in parts of Iraq amid a wave of popular uprisings that spread throughout the Middle East and North Africa. On February 25, thousands of demonstrators took to the streets in Iraq to protest the country’s high unemployment rate, corruption, and insufficient public services. Iraqi police responded aggressively, attempting to disperse protesters with water cannons and in some cases live fire. There were also reports that journalists had been detained and beaten by security forces. The protests caused several provincial governors to step down from their posts. In the aftermath of the demonstrations, Mālikī announced new initiatives to meet protesters’ demands, including measures to ensure greater government accountability and fight corruption.

In October 2011 the United States announced that the last of its 39,000 troops would leave Iraq at the end of 2011. On December 15 the U.S. military held a ceremony in Baghdad to formally declare the end of its mission in Iraq, as the final U.S. forces prepared to depart.